1. Meeting overview and key information
Present
- Joel Addison (President)
- Sae Ra Germaine (Vice-President)
- Neill Cox (Secretary)
- Andrew Pam (Council)
- Russell Stuart (Treasurer)
- Jennifer Cox (Council)
- Jonathan Woithe (Council)
Apologies
Not Present
Meeting opened at 20:03 AEDT by Joel and quorum was achieved.
Minutes taken by Neill
2. Log of correspondence
- Fwd: ID for Linux Australia Inc, Client ID 417289 ATTN : Madhura [Wi]
- Latest email to Wise
- Fwd: Status of transfer #${payment}
- Pretalx/Pretix invoices due
- PyCon AU 2024 bank account signatories
- Fwd: OSI Election and Candidate Information
- Hardware grant guidelines
- Enquiry from Julia Topliss via the Linux Australia Website Contact Form – Jonathan has sent an initial response, follow up is needed. Joel to do this.
- Requesting Help – Jonathan has sent an initial response, discussion needed. JOnathan will follow up: explain what LA does, ask for more information about what the club does (whether they do Open Source-like things, etc).
- Everything Open 2025 – Adelaide is still a possibility. Need to confirm venue and team composition.
3. Items for discussion
- Drupal sub committee update
Drupal South Sydney was last week. Generally very successful in terms of attendance and feedback. 255 attendees. Significant number of new delegates, many local. Over half the tickets came in at the latebird price so ticket revenue was up at $65k, but sponsorship was down. Looking at a projected loss of $13.2K
Good feedback from the Drupal Association. Good coverage on Drupal industry media.
The committee had a session. An election is coming up. Not too many volunteers for the committee, but more enthusiasm for being involved in other ways.
It’s probably too expensive to run events in Sydney in the future.
Question from Joel: LA’s insurance is up for renewal so we need to know how many events will Drupal South be running? What size?
Answer: Planning an event in Melbourne, discussions about whether to continue the large corporate event and the feedback is that it is worth doing. Don’t want to reduce the conference to a single track.
Drupal Asia
Don’t quite have a final budget but DrupalCon Asia was announced at Drupal South Sydney. In the final stages of finding a venue. The experience of finding a venue in Singapore is very different from Australia/NZ. Need to spend much more effort on chasing the venues
DrupalCon will have a quite different sponsorship model. Rather than just a Gold/Silver/Bronze there is a core sponsorship and then many possible add ons. Sponsorship prices are based on attendance.
At this point the budget looks like it will break even.
The Drupal Association is not looking to make a major profit, but is keen to make a deal. At this point it looks like the DA will take a 30% cut of profit.
Mike has not yet spoken to the Singapore Tourism Board. Sae Ra suggests that they might be a useful resource. They’re keen to help conferences come to Singapore.
There are a large group of European agencies looking at expanding into Asia. They should be a good source of sponsors.
Ticket prices are more likely to be an issue. Ticket prices are low for a DrupalCon, but quite hight relative to local incomes.
It might be worth looking at the possibility of travel grants. EO/LCA/PyConAU have traditionally included a DEI sponsorship, so maybe this is worth considering for DrupalCon Asia.
Applications for assistance normally come through a web form that asks for what assistance is needed (travel, accommodation, tickets) and what the grant would allow the delegate to do.
Question from Mike – will a decision need to wait for the next council meeting or can we do something sooner.
Answer: We can do things outside of meetings, but we only do so if there is an urgent need.
Looking at 4-6 December.
Linux Australia will look into insurance, the Drupal Association will not provide any financial assistance, including insurance.
Linux Australia will also need to provide bank accounts. Probably through Wise.
Michael and the DrupalCon Asia (Joe Chin) will need to be able to operate on the bank accounts. They will need to complete a financial induction with Linux Australia and we need to get them authenticated to Wise ASAP.
- Admin team update
New mail server is almost ready to go. Needs some reassembly. Will put it together over the long weekend. Otherwise once EO is done will look to move the mail and lists for EO to FastMail which will remove the last blockers for maintenance of our servers.
We have bought the professional plan at retail price, but do not currently have the reseller option attached to it. Sae Ra has people to contact at FastMail to sort this out. We will probably be able to move to a cheaper plan once our migration is complete, but in the meantime we need support.
- Joomla sub committee update
No representative present.
- PyCon AU sub committee update
No representative present.
- Flounder sub committee update
No representative present.
- LUV sub committee update
Usual meetings are continuing (two technical meetings and one social each month). Looking at collaborating with ComputerBank. Seeing some young people coming to the meetings, but not all of them come back.
No progress on an election yet.
- WordPress sub committee update
Good progress for Sydney. Venue pencilled in with dates of 2 and 3 Nov.
Financial induction to do for some members of the committee.
The budget has been sent to the LA council
WordCamp is a branded conference. There is a meeting with WordCamp to finalise the budget for WordCamp Sydney.
There have been some discussions with WordCamp who were hoping that the AV could be done by volunteers, but there are a lot of risks involved and the decision is currently that it should be done by professionals.
The MoU has been signed by Linux Australia. Sae Ra will check to see if it has been sent to WordCamp.
- Everything Open 2024
Have sold 110 tickets. Sales are accelerating
APNIC are organising their meeting around EO
Looking at the hybrid options. The ticket type has been created.
Making sure speakers are locked in.
There are only six taxis in Gladstone! May use the bus for transport.
- Sorting out NZ banking
Need Neill to produce minutes for the 2024 AGM
Also all council members need to get their IDs sorted out by the end of next week.
Council members will sign the minutes and constitution as per requirements from ANZ, then we will send this.
4. Items for noting
5. Other business
6. In camera
- Nothing was discussed in camera
7. Action items
7.1 Completed Items
7.2 Carried Forward
- Respond to DjangoGirls request – Neill Cox
Meeting closed at 21:33
Next meeting is scheduled for 2024-04-10 – 7:30pm AEST / 7:00pm ACST
